Absurd and limit in Schopenhauer’s philosophy

Abstract

The starting point of the work was Rosset’s disturbing and surprising reading of Schopenhauer's philosophy. Initially, it tends to lean more in the critical direction of Rosset’s thesis on the philosophy of absurdity than on the perhaps more controversial thesis of genealogical intuition. Accepting the radical differentiation established by Schopenhauer between the metaphysical and empirical planes defends the hypothesis that there is, in Schopenhauer’s texts, a possible relation between the two: a relation we call hermeneutics. It is at his birth, therefore, that Schopenhauer’s philosophy receives the scar that will make it the target of those who will try to force it to conform to one of the alternatives: knowledge or philosophy, wisdom or theory, worldview or doctrine. In any case, we argue that the important thing is the clear awareness of the limits that seem to be at play in the relation 19 between Representation and Will. Therefore, the problem of reality and ideality finally points to the need to impose limits on philosophy and thus make possible the characterization of Schopenhauer's metaphysics as a philosophy of the limit.